Editorial | Sustained criticism of ‘justified departure’ policy crucial in coming year

  The Committee on Student Life (CSL) policy allowing religious groups to apply through the Chaplaincy for exemption from the university’s nondiscrimination policy confuses and repels the people it is meant to help, baffles the administrators charged with enforcing it, frustrates the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Judiciary asked to comply with it and doesn’t even seem to be entirely clear to the people who were in the room while it was being written.

Op-Ed | The end of silence

  In October 2012, around the third anniversary of her sexual assault, Ali Safran came up with the idea for Surviving in Numbers, a sexual assault awareness project. She thought about all the people she had told over the past 3 years and how she’d reported her assault to the police, gone through the legal process, done everything a victim is “supposed” to do — without getting any real justice.

Op-Ed | Keep telling us we are naive

  It’s almost summer and the weather is still cold, still gray — is it even spring yet? School’s almost out, sure, but summer means more than that — and a lot more than beach balls and sandcastles and feisty gulls. It means we’re one step closer to the “real world.

Op-ed | Tufts must defend survivors’ dignity in policy and practice

  Today, we and several other students from the Consent Culture Network and Action for Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP) are sending an open letter to members of the administration, asking for changes to the policy and institutional infrastructure surrounding sexual assault at Tufts.

Op-ed | The Daily is nobody’s mouthpiece

  There has to be a line between journalism and advocacy. The job of promoting specific policies on behalf of specific groups has to be distinct from the job of disseminating news for an entire, diverse community. It’s particularly important on a campus like Tufts, where discourse is often one-sided and the loudest voices tend to be in agreement.

Letter from the Editor

  Every weeknight, usually around 1 or 2 a.m., a member of the Daily’s staff calls a guy named Fred. Fred works at Gannett Publishing and has a classic Irish Boston accent, which he used one night this semester to ask if I had been one of the students peeing on the floor at Winter Bash.

Editorial | Maciejewski for Tufts: a sensible vote

  Tomorrow when students vote, they again face the question of what they want in a Senate and in a president. A vote for Christie Maciejewski will mean we value formal experience with Senate processes, collaboration with administrators and a commitment to addressing the Senate’s flaws with a careful consideration of what’s best for everyone.

Op-ed | Points of consideration — gaming rank voting

  It is highly atypical to have three Presidential Candidates.  In fact, no current TCU member has had the opportunity to vote in a Tufts Community Union (TCU) Presidential Election with three candidates. So, this situation presents a departure from the norm and thus, a seeming departure from precedent.

Op-ed | A new conversation about genetically modified food

  The public debate over genetically modified (GM) food has devolved into a scrappy shouting match unrooted from the reality of the international food system. The combative dialogue confuses the public and does little to ensure the adoption of transformative policies or technologies that are necessary to fix our broken food system. 1 comment

Editorial | Tufts-owned warehouse residents should accept fate

  A community of artists in a warehouse close to Tufts who have stayed there for a number of years have been given six months to leave the premises. The artisans, who run businesses out of the warehouse involving a number of different crafts, including furniture construction, have stayed there for many decades doing their craftwork. 8 comments

Walker Bristol | Notes from the Underclass

Art in every action

  In red, black and white, a masked face peeks out from a wall outside the Mayer Campus Center. Fingers flash a peace sign. A soldier holds a gun with the nuclear disarmament symbol on her jacket. The ironic characters and whispers of injustice make clear, in an image we pass by every day, that oppression lingers around us.

Op-ed | Handicapped accessibility: the civil rights movement of the future

    Tufts University, a bastion of liberalism and progressivism in the heart of Massachusetts. Who would think that a policy of our university directly and actively discriminates against those members of the student body who happen to be disabled? Since our inception as a college in 1852, Tufts has considered itself a forward-looking and well-meaning, beneficent institution bent on ameliorating the problems of the world, one student group at a time.